After the conclusion of the great
migrations in the Aegean, the Greeks developed a proud racial consciousness.
They called themselves Hellenes, originally the name, according to Homer, of a
small tribe living south of Thessaly. The term Greeks, used by later foreign
peoples, was derived from Graecia, the Latin name for a small Hellenic tribe of
Epirus, presumably the Hellenes with whom the Romans first had dealings. Out of
the mythology that became the basis of an intricate religion, the Hellenes
developed a genealogy that traced their ancestry to semidivine heroes. SeeGreek Mythology.

Although the small Hellenic states
maintained their autonomy, they pursued a common course of political
development. In the pre-Hellenic period the tribal chiefs of invading tribes
became the kings of the territories they conquered. These monarchies were slowly
replaced, between 800 and 650 BC, by oligarchies of aristrocrats, as the noble
families acquired land, the measure of wealth and power. About 650 BC many of
the Hellenic oligarchies were themselves overthrown by wealthy commoners or
disgruntled aristocrats, called tyrants. The rise of the tyrants was due
mainly to economic conditions. Popular discontent under the aristocracies had
become a major political factor because of the increasing enslavement of
landless peasants; colonization and trade in the 8th and 7th centuries BC
hastened the development of a prosperous merchant class, which took advantage of
the mounting discontent to demand a share of power with the aristrocrats in the
city-states.

Age of Tyrants

The age of the Greek tyrants (circa
650-500 BC) was notable for advances made in Hellenic civilization. The title of
tyrant connoted that political power had been illegally seized, rather than that
it was abused. Generally, the tyrants, such as Periander of Corinth, Gelon
of Syracuse, and Polycrates of Samos, were wise and popular rulers. Trade and
industry flourished. In the wake of political and economic strength came a
flowering of Hellenic culture, especially in Ionia, where Greek philosophy began
with the speculations of Thales,
Anaximander, and Anaximenes.
The development of cultural pursuits common to all the Hellenic cities was one
of the factors that united ancient Greece, despite the political separation of
the various states. Another factor was the Greek language, the many dialects of
which were readily understandable in any part of the country or any colony. The
third factor was the Greek religion, which held the Hellenes together, and the
sanctuary of Delphi, with its
oracle, became the greatest national shrine. As a corollary to their religion,
the Greeks held four national festivals, called games—the Olympian, Isthmian,
Pythian, and Nemean. The Olympian
games were considered so important that many Greeks dated their
historical reckoning from the first Olympiad (the four-year period between
sessions at the Olympian games) held in 776 BC. Related to religion, at least in
origin, was the Amphictyonic League,
an organization of Hellenic tribes that was established for the protection and
administration of shrines.

From Monarchy to Democracy

Some unification of the city-states
took place. Between the 8th and 6th centuries BC, Athens and Sparta became the
two dominant cities of Greece. Each of these great states united its weaker
neighbors into a league or confederacy under its control. Sparta, a completely
militarized and aristocratic state, established its leadership mainly by
conquest, and kept its subject states under strict rule. The unification of
Attica was, however, carried on by mutual and peaceful agreement under the
leadership of Athens, and the inhabitants of smaller cities were given Athenian
citizenship. The hereditary kingship of Athens was abolished in 683 BC by the
nobles, or Eupatridae, who ruled Athens until the mid-6th century BC. The
Eupatridae retained complete authority by their supreme power to dispense
justice, often in an arbitrary fashion. In 621 BC the statesman Draco codified
and published the Athenian law, thereby limiting the judiciary power of the
nobles. A second major blow to the hereditary power of the Eupatridae was the
code of the Athenian statesman and legislator Solon
in 594 BC, which reformed the Draconian code and gave citizenship to the lower
classes. During the wise and enlightened rule (560-527 BC) of the tyrant Pisistratus,
the forms of government began to take on elements of democracy. Hippias
and Hipparchus, sons of Pisistratus, inherited their father's power, but they
were considerably more despotic. Hippias, who survived Hipparchus, was expelled
by a popular uprising in 510 BC. In the resulting political strife, the
supporters of democracy, under the great statesman Cleisthenes,
won a complete victory, and a new constitution, based on democratic principles,
took effect about 502 BC. The beginning of democratic rule was the dawn of the
greatest period of Athenian history. Agriculture and commerce flourished.
Moreover, the center of artistic and intellectual endeavor, until that time
situated in the cities of the Asia Minor coast, was rapidly transferred to
thriving Athens.

The Persian Wars

The Greek colonies in Asia Minor had
been conquered by Croesus,
king of Lydia, in the early part of his reign (560-546 BC) and brought into the
Lydian Empire. Croesus was a mild ruler, sympathetic to the Hellenes, and an
ally of Sparta; the economic, political, and intellectual life of the colonies
was greatly stimulated by Lydian rule. In 546 BC Croesus was overthrown by Cyrus
the Great, king of Persia. Except for the island of Sámos, which ably defended
itself, the Greek cities in Asia and the coastal islands became part of the
Persian Empire.

In 499 BC Ionia, assisted by Athens
and Eretria, revolted against Persia. The rebels were, at first, successful, and
King Darius I of Persia swore to avenge himself. He put down the revolt in 493
BC and, after sacking Miletus, reestablished his absolute control over Ionia. A
year later Mardonius, the king's son-in-law, led a great Persian fleet to exact
vengeance from Greece, but most of the ships were wrecked off Mount Athos. At
the same time, Darius sent heralds to Greece, requiring tokens of submission
from all the Greek city-states. Although most of the smaller states acquiesced,
Sparta and Athens refused, and slew the Persian heralds as a gesture of
defiance. Darius, enraged by the Greek insult as well as by the fate of his
fleet, prepared a second expedition, which set sail in 490 BC. After destroying
Eretria, the Persian army proceeded to the plain of Marathon
near Athens. The Athenian leaders sent to Sparta for aid, but the message
arrived during a religious festival, which prevented the Spartans from leaving.
Nevertheless, the Athenian army, under Miltiades, won an overwhelming victory
over a Persian force three times as large, and the Persians withdrew.

Darius immediately began to ready a
third expedition; his son, Xerxes I, who succeeded him in 486 BC, brought
together one of the largest armies in ancient history. In 481 BC the Persians
crossed the Hellespont strait over a bridge of boats and marched southward. The
Greeks made their first stand in 480 BC at Thermopylae,
where the Spartan leader Leonidas I
and several thousand soldiers heroically defended the narrow pass. A treacherous
Greek showed the Persians another path that enabled the invaders to enter the
pass from the rear. Leonidas permitted most of his men to withdraw, but he and a
force of 300 Spartans and 700 Thespians resisted to the end and were
annihilated. The Persians then proceeded to Athens, capturing and burning the
abandoned city. Meanwhile, the Persian fleet pursued the Greek fleet to Salamís,
an island in the Gulf of Aegina (now known as the Gulf of Saronikós) near
Athens. In the naval battle that ensued, fewer than 400 Greek vessels, under the
Athenian general and statesman Themistocles,
defeated 1200 Persian vessels. Xerxes, who had watched the battle from a golden
throne on a hill overlooking the harbor of Salamís, fled to Asia. In the
following year, 479 BC, the remainder of the Persian forces in Greece were
overwhelmed at Plataea, and the invaders were finally driven out.

The Ascendancy of Athens

As a result of its brilliant
leadership in the Persian wars, Athens became the most influential state in
Greece. Moreover, the wars had demonstrated the increasing importance of
seapower, for the naval battle of Salamís had been the decisive engagement.
Sparta, hitherto the greatest military power in Greece because of its army, lost
its prestige to the Athenian fleet. In 478 BC a large number of Greek states
formed a voluntary alliance, the Delian
League, to drive the Persians from the Greek cities and coastal islands
of Asia Minor. Athens, as a matter of course, headed the alliance. The victories
of the league, then under the Athenian general Cimon, resulted (476-466 BC) in
the liberation of the Asia Minor coast from Persia. Athens, however, began to
exert its power over the other members of the league to such an extent that they
became its subjects rather than its allies. The Athenians exacted tribute from
their erstwhile confederates, and, when Naxos attempted to withdraw from the
league, the fortifications of that city were razed.

The period of Athenian domination
during the 5th century BC has become known as the golden age of Athens. Under Pericles,
who became leader of the popular party and head of the state in 460 BC, the city
attained its greatest splendor. The constitution, reformed to further internal
democracy, contained provisions such as payment for jury service, thereby
permitting even the poorest citizens to serve. Pericles was determined to make
Athens the most beautiful city in the world.

The Parthenon, the Erechtheum, the
Propylaea, and other great buildings were constructed. Greek drama reached its
greatest expression with the plays of such dramatists as Aeschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides,
and the comedy writer Aristophanes.
Thucydides and Herodotus,
an Ionian, became famous historians; Socrates
became an influential philosopher; and the cultivation of intellect in Periclean
Athens made the city famous as an artistic and cultural center.

The Peloponnesian War

Despite the excellent internal
condition of the city, the foreign policy of Athens proved its undoing. The
members of the Delian League were discontented and chafed under Athenian rule.
Sparta, moreover, was envious of Athenian prosperity. A league between the
cities of the Pelopónnisos had existed since about 550 BC, under the domination
of Sparta, and the Peloponnesian League began to oppose Athens actively. In 431
BC the inevitable clash between Athens and Sparta occurred. It was precipitated
by Athenian aid to Corcyra during a dispute between Corcyra and Corinth, an ally
of Sparta. Known as the Peloponnesian War, the struggle between the two great
confederacies lasted until 404 BC and resulted in establishing Spartan supremacy
in Greece. At the conclusion of the war, Sparta sponsored an oligarchy, known as
the Thirty Tyrants, to rule Athens. Similar ruling bodies were established in
the cities and islands of Asia Minor. Spartan rule soon showed itself as even
harsher and more oppressive than that of Athens. In 403 BC the Athenians under
Thrasybulus revolted, expelled the Spartan garrison that had supported the
oligarchs, and restored their democracy and independence. Other Greek cities
consistently rebelled against the control of Sparta.

Shifting Alliances

The Greek states began,
individually, to seek aid from their traditional enemy, Persia. In 399 BC the
marauding activities of Persia on the Asia Minor coast led Sparta to send an
army there. Although the Spartan army met with some success, it was forced to
return in 395 BC to oppose a coalition of Argos, Athens, Corinth, and Thebes.
The resulting conflict, known as the Corinthian War, continued, mainly as
small-scale warfare, until 387 BC, when Sparta, allying itself with Persia,
imposed the Peace of Antalcidas on its unwilling subject states. By the terms of
the Persian-Spartan settlement, the entire west coast of Asia Minor was ceded to
Persia, and the city-states of Greece were made autonomous. Despite this
agreement, Sparta in 382 BC invaded Thebes and captured the city of Olynthus in
the north. The Theban general Pelopidas,
supported by Athens, led an uprising three years later and expelled the Spartan
occupation force. War between Sparta and Athens in alliance with Thebes was
resumed, ending with the Battle of Leuctra, in 371 BC, in which the Thebans, led
by Epaminondas, so completely
defeated their enemies that Spartan domination came to an end. Thebes, by virtue
of its victory, became the leading Greek state. The other states resented its
leadership, and the ascendancy of Thebes inaugurated an unhappy period of civil
unrest and economic misery resulting from internecine strife. Athens, in
particular, refused to submit to Theban supremacy and in 369 BC became an ally
of Sparta. At best insecure, the Theban control was dependent principally on the
brilliant leadership of Epaminondas, and when he was killed in the Battle of
Mantinea in 362 BC, Thebes again became just another state among many.

Macedonian Supremacy

During this period of strife in
Greece, Macedonia, the
northern neighbor of Thessaly, was initiating a policy of expansion that was
destined to make it one of the greatest world powers in ancient history. Philip
II, who became king of Macedonia in 359 BC, was a great admirer of Greek
civilization, but he was well aware of its greatest weakness, the lack of
political unity. Directly after he came to the throne, Philip annexed the Greek
colonies on the coast of Macedonia and Thrace and determined to make himself
master of the peninsula. Astute political craft and the force of Macedonian arms
helped Philip to realize his ambitions, despite the opposition of many prominent
Greek statesmen led by Demosthenes.
By 338 BC, after winning the decisive battle of Chaironeia against Athens and
Thebes, Philip was sufficiently powerful to call a congress of the Greek states.
The congress acknowledged Macedonian supremacy in the peninsula and appointed
Philip commander in chief of the Greek forces. A year later, a second congress
declared war on Persia, the traditional enemy. Philip began at once to prepare
for an Asian campaign, but he was assassinated in 336 BC. His son, Alexander,
who was then 20 years old, succeeded him (seeAlexander
the Great).

In 334 BC Alexander set out to
invade Persia. During the next ten years, his conquests extended Greek influence
as well as the Greek civilization and language throughout a Macedonian empire
that ranged as far east as northern India and as far south and west as Egypt. By
the time of Alexander's death in 323 BC, the culture of Greece had spread
through most of the ancient world.

Hellenistic Period

Following the death of Alexander,
the Macedonian generals began to partition his vast empire among themselves. The
disagreements arising from this division resulted in a series of wars from 322
to 275 BC, many of which took place in Greece. Thus, one of the characteristics
of the Hellenistic period, which lasted from the death of Alexander until the
acquisition of Greece as a Roman province in 146 BC, was the deterioration of
the Greek city-states as political entities and the gradual decline of Greek
political independence as a whole.

Nevertheless, the Hellenistic period
was marked by the triumph of Greece as the fountainhead of culture, and its way
of life was adopted, as a result of Alexander's conquests, throughout most of
the ancient world.

The Diadochi

Of the kingdoms established by the
generals of Alexander, called the Diadochi (Greek diadochos,
"successor"), the most important were Syria under the Seleucid
dynasty, and Egypt under the rule of the Ptolemies. The capital of Ptolemaic
Egypt, Alexandria, which had
been founded by Alexander in 332 BC, developed into a center of Greek learning
rivaling and occasionally surpassing Athens. Every part of the Hellenistic world
devoted itself to the cultivation of art and intellect. Such men as the
mathematicians Euclid and Archimedes,
the philosophers Epicurus and
Zeno of Citium, and the poets
Apollonius of Rhodes and Theocritus
were characteristic of the age. So strongly was Hellenistic culture implanted
that it became one of the most important elements in early Christianity.

In 290 BC the city-states of central
Greece began to join the Aetolian
League, a powerful military confederation that had originally been
organized during the reign of Philip II by the cities of Aetolia for their
mutual benefit and protection. A second and similar organization, known as the Achaean
League, became, in 280 BC, the supreme confederation of the cities in the
northern Pelopónnisos. Later other cities joined. Both alliances dedicated
themselves to saving the other Greek states from domination by the kingdom of
Macedonia. The Achaean League became much more powerful than its rival and tried
to acquire control of all Greece. Led by the statesman and general Aratus of
Sicyon, the league began a conflict with Sparta, which had joined neither
alliance. In the war between the Achaeans and Sparta, the league was at first
defeated, and forgoing its primary purpose, called on Macedonia for military
aid, which was granted. The alliance then defeated Sparta, but from that time on
it was dominated by Macedonia.

Roman Interference

In 215 BC Rome began to interfere in
Greek affairs. Philip V of Macedonia allied himself with Carthage
against Rome, but the Romans, acquiring the support of the Aetolian League,
overcame the Macedonian forces in 206 BC and obtained a firm foothold in Greece.
Rome, aided by both leagues, again defeated Philip in 197 BC, and Macedonia,
completely subjugated, agreed to a peace with Rome by which the independence of
the Greek city-states was recognized. The Greek city-states found that they had
exchanged one master for another. In a last desperate attempt to free
themselves, the members of the Achaean League resisted the demands that Rome
made on it in 149 BC. The resulting war ended with the destruction of Corinth by
Roman legions in 146 BC. The leagues were abolished and Greek territories came
completely under direct Roman rule. Macedonia was annexed as a Roman province
and governed by a Roman proconsul who also controlled the Greek city-states to
the south.

Roman and Medieval Greece

For 60 years after 146 BC, Greece
was competently administered by Rome. Some cities, such as Athens and Sparta,
even retained their free status. In 88 BC, when Mithridates
VI Eupator, king of Pontus, began a campaign of conquest in
Roman-controlled territories, however, many cities of Greece supported the Asian
monarch because he had promised to help them regain their independence. Roman
legions under Lucius Cornelius Sulla forced Mithridates out of Greece and
crushed the rebellion, sacking Athens in 86 BC and Thebes a year later. Roman
punishment of all the rebellious cities was heavy, and the campaigns fought on
Greek soil left central Greece in ruins. As a result, the country began to
disintegrate economically. Athens remained a center of philosophy and learning,
but its commerce became almost nonexistent. About 22 BC Augustus, the first
Roman emperor, separated the Greek city-states from Macedonia and made the
former a province called Achaea.

Greek Renaissance

Under the Roman Empire, in the first
centuries of the Christian era, a Greek renaissance took place, particularly
during the reign of the emperor Hadrian. With his contemporary, the wealthy
Greek scholar Herodes Atticus, Hadrian beautified Athens and restored many of
the ruined cities. In the middle of the 3rd century AD, however, this rebirth
was checked by the Goths, who in 267 and 268 overran the peninsula, captured
Athens, and laid waste the cities of Argos, Corinth, and Sparta.

After 395 the Roman Empire was ruled
by two co-emperors, one in the Latin West and the other in the Hellenic East. By
the 6th century a successor empire, known as the Byzantine, had evolved in the
East. It included all of Greece and the Aegean region and was characterized by a
mixture of Hellenic culture, Oriental influences from the Middle East, and
Christianity. Greece itself became a neglected and obscure province. From the
6th to the 8th century, Slavonic tribes from the north migrated into the
peninsula, occupying llyria and Thrace.